http://mmajunkie.comHerb Dean is guided by his conscience, and his conscience told him to give Shane Carwin a chance.

The heavyweight came within a hair of rescue from Dean after being felled by Junior dos Santos’ punches in the main event of this past Saturday’s UFC 131 event. But the referee’s experience told him that Carwin could continue.

“I was definitely very close to stopping the fight,” he today told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “Maybe one more unblocked punch I would have, but I’m always looking for a reason to allow a fight to continue.”

The philosophy holds even when there’s pressure for him to put a stop to a gruesome scene. In this past Saturday’s case, it came from Dos Santos, who looked at Dean and told him to stop the fight as Carwin’s face turned into a crimson mask.

If Dean hadn’t seen the fighter raising his hand to block the punches during the onslaught, the whole thing might have been over in the first round. But Carwin eventually righted himself, and the bout went on.

“Referees are not here to interfere and take part in the outcomes,” Dean said. “So if you can see if someone is working on something and moving in a direction to better his position, you’re going to always try to give him a chance to work that out.

“That’s what Shane Carwin was doing. He did a good job, and he was able to weather the storm, and he came back.”

Dean, who’s refereed thousands of fights in 11 years as the third man in the cage, received high praise from UFC president Dana White following the event.

“I don’t know this guy,” White said. “We don’t hang out. I’ve said hi to him, but I’ve never said two words. Herb Dean is the best referee in the business. I thought it before [tonight].

“When you’ve got a fighter there, sometimes these guys get scared, and they get nervous or whatever, and they don’t want to get booed. You’re in charge in there. You make the decisions.”

An early passion for the sport

Dean can’t remember when he started refereeing. Sometime in 1999, he said, at a King of the Cage event held in Soboba Casino in San Jacinto, Calif. They were the dark days of the sport, a time when fighters could wear wrestling shoes, and soccer kicks and knees to the head of a downed opponent were legal.

He had been training with Larry Landless, a fighter and sometime-referee, to fight professionally. In the meantime, he went to local events to help out. He set up chairs, passed out flyers, built the cage, and acted as a backstage runner. In his day job, he worked as a grip on film and TV sets and occasionally taught anti-drug classes at a hospital. He eventually asked Landless if he could give refereeing a try.

“After my first match, I thought, ‘Wow, there’s a lot going on here,'” Dean said. “I spent a lot of time thinking about it and talking to other officials. It was a lot more involved than I thought it would be. It was actually serious. Then I started spending time thinking about it and realized I really liked doing it.”

Soon, he was doing the job on a regular basis and building a name in Southern California as one of the go-to guys. When MMA became legal in 2006, he had already overseen hundreds of fights.

He’s not always managed to avoid controversy. He was roundly booed following a stoppage victory for Tito Ortiz at UFC 61, and he caught flack during “The Ultimate Fighter 10″ for not stopping a fight between Roy Nelson and Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson in the reality show’s preliminary round.

But he’s also made some critical calls. Most famously, he spotted Tim Sylvia’s arm breaking during a heavyweight title fight at UFC 48 and immediately stopped the fight (before first blurting out an expletive). He was viciously booed until the replays were shown in the arena.

Situations such as the one he encountered this past Saturday are not new. But if he does run across something he hasn’t seen before, he tries to think things through so he make better calls the next time out.

Lately, though, he’s been making all the right calls.

“There’s always going to be something different,” Dean said. “But after refereeing thousands of matches, I’ve had a few things happen. So some of the things that happen, I’ve been there before. Whether I did it right or wrong the first time, I’ve had a chance to think about it, and that’s helped.”

Improving the sport

Making the right call has, of course, been a constant source of aggravation for fans when it comes to the judging process.

Another round of baffling calls at UFC 131 prompted fans to get out their pitchforks, and White was more than willing to lead the charge. After a judge gave Darren Elkins all three rounds over Michihiro Omigawa in the event’s opening fight, the executive gave Omigawa his show and win money.

“Overruled,” White said.

Dean, of course, is a little too busy to be scoring a fight as it happens.

“If it’s really obviously one-sided, of course I know who’s ahead,” he said. “In a close match, I don’t think I would be qualified to make a decision on who’s ahead or who’s not because I’m more focused on trying to keep it safe and enforce the rules.”

But when it comes to improving the quality of officiating, he said that education is the best way to make things better. Both he and referee “Big” John McCarthy teach classes in Southern California on judging and refereeing.

While there will always be controversies in MMA, hopefully there will be fewer as time goes on.

“Just for the fact that people are talking about it, and people are showing examples – ‘OK, this is a 10-8 round, and this isn’t, and this is why’ – as long as conversations like that are happening, things are going to get better,” Dean said.

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